“My boy, you are getting married. I am an old man. Allow me my pleasures.”
Cassian sighed. He snatched the towel from the rope and wiped his brow. “Eight o’clock,” he said. “Do not be late.”
Alice did not want to wear the blue gown.
As her maid pinned the sash, she told herself that she was wearing it because it had been laid out, because the green one was creased, because the pink one was at the laundress, and because the cream one made her sallow.
She told herself she was wearing it because it was, by any measure, the most appropriate gown in her wardrobe for an intimate dinner at the home of a duke.
As her maid styled her hair, she told herself that she was not wearing the blue gown because Cassian Arnolds had asked for it. As she pinned her grandmother’s pearls at her throat, she told herself that she was certainly not wearing it to please him.
She glanced at herself in the mirror. The blue gown did not displease her.
That, she thought ruefully, was as much as she was willing to admit.
“You look stunning,” Daphne said from the doorway.
“I look adequate.”
“Stunning.”
“I look like a girl who is going to dinner at her betrothed’s house and will be thoroughly observed by her betrothed’s friends, and who would very much like to be allowed to disappear into a wall.”
“Stunning.”
Alice turned around. “Stop saying that this instant.”
“You want to impress your betrothed.”
There was a slight edge to Daphne’s voice. Not unkind but not entirely teasing either.
Alice looked at her sister, who was leaning tall and thin against the doorframe with her arms folded. The needling intelligence in her eyes was the precise expression she had worn last nightwhen she had asked whether the Duke of Langton was in love with Alice or merely doing his duty.
“Of course.” Alice turned back to the mirror. “Why else would I worry?”
“Hmm.”
“Daphne.”
“I said nothing.”
“You hummed.”
“It was a small hum.”
“Daphne.”
The butler appeared in the corridor to announce that the carriage was ready, and their parents were waiting for them downstairs. Their mother’s voice was already pitched high with anticipation, and their father’s voice was already weary.
Alice took a last look at herself in the mirror before walking out of her room.
Langton House was exactly as she remembered it.
She had only been there once, and that was two years ago in the dark with a fistful of pebbles. At the time, she had not taken in the front. It was tall, pale, and respectable. The entrance hall, when the butler led them in, smelled of beeswax and very old wood and faintly of orange peel.
She fixed her sash then again. She had fixed her sash four times in the carriage, twice on the steps, and once before the butler had finished bowing. Her hand was now on her grandmother’s pearls, twisting them at her throat, before she had given herself permission to put it there.
“Stop fidgeting,” Daphne murmured behind her shoulder. “He has not even looked at you yet, Alice. Save some for when he does.”
